tiggymalvern (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tiggymalvern) wrote2015-05-20 05:15 pm
tiggymalvern) wrote2015-05-20 05:15 pm
SIFF 2015 - the LONG post
SIFF arrived again for the year! And so did ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teaforme, who came to stay with us, which meant we went to see a lot of films in a short time, and none of them got written up. Normally I do a post after every three films or so, but not this time...
The Farewell Party. Several residents in an Israeli retirement home get together and build a euthanasia machine for a very ill friend who wants to die. All goes well until rumours about the death start to spread through the home, and other people also want to use the machine. The group come under serious emotional and ethical strain, as their endeavour goes from helping one friend to being Dr Kevorkian, and each person has a different idea on where and how to draw the line.
There are some wonderful moments of comedy in this film, which is well acted with some truly charming central characters. The voluntary euthanasia debate is central to the film, and covered from all angles. It's not flawless - one character seemed just too unpleasant to be credible to me, not because there aren't people like that, but because none of the others seemed to be aware of just how selfish he was. There was also an odd moment with a musical number that didn't work for me. But overall, this was a very entertaining look at a very serious subject. 8/10
Snow on the Blades. As Japan begins to open up to the west at the end of the Edo period, there is internal unrest between those in favour and those who oppose it. Shimura Kingo is the personal bodyguard to a lord who is assassinated on his watch. Forbidden the traditional ritual suicide, he is instead assigned the task of finding and killing the assassins. Thirteen years later, he is still trying to find the last surviving assailant, but during those years, the world has changed around him, and the samurai and their code are now a laughing stock, an archaic remnant of a backward-looking world.
The film is a commentary on the pace of change in the world, and the struggle to maintain a personal sense of honour and what that means to different people. It has beautiful cinematography, but can be a little heavy-handed in places - too much is said instead of implied, and sometimes visual messages are very in-your-face. I did like the role of the women in this film - the period massively limits what they can say and do, but their actions are a huge influence on the men, just the same. I was never in any doubt how the film was going to end, but I was very curious to know what Shimura's self-justification was going to be, and I did not guess the source of honour that he chose. Pretty to look at, and entertaining despite me wishing for a little more subtlety. 7/10
The New Girlfriend. Laura and Claire have been friends since childhood. When Laura is dying, Claire promises to look out for her husband and baby daughter. Claire then discovers that David is a transvestite, and since Laura's death he has been spending more time as a woman, dressed in his dead wife's clothes. In keeping her promise to Laura, Claire grows closer to Virginia than she ever was to David.
This film starts so well - it's utterly charming and full of humour, and I was enjoying it immensely and thinking it would be worth 8/10. And then it suddenly decides it needs to have an ending, and descends into terrible cliched melodrama, before wrapping everything up abruptly without giving even a nod to the difficult emotional consequences of its characters' choices. It's like a cheery day out that turns into a car crash and leaves you wondering what the hell just happened. 5/10
Beyond Zero: 1914-1918. This was a showing of two short films by the same director. The first was a standard length short, called Back to the Soil. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, as Communism strengthened its grip, Jews were banned from the merchant trades and rendered penniless. A Jewish committee arranged for these newly jobless people to be resettled into the Ukraine and Belarus and given land as farmers. The director's grandfather went on a tour of these newly settled communities, filming what he saw, and the director has re-edited this old footage into this short film. The footage was very repetitive - town after town of bedraggled-looking people working the land by hand and with horses - but instead of boring I found it utterly haunting. The entire subject was something I'd never even heard of, and the constant images of windswept steppes with everyone dressed against the cold even in late May really brought home what a miserable existence it must have been for these city folk who were suddenly told to farm or starve. I scored it 8/10, but the SO andteaforme both hated the music and scored it lower.
The titular Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 was in the same vein, but using old nitrate footage of the Great War. Some of this footage was in very poor condition, and it was shown with all its imperfections. This could be used to great effect - footage of soldiers training for trench warfare disappearing into what looked like blurry flame was very apt, considering what happened to so many of them. At other times, it was an interesting visual puzzle as a blotchy mess gradually cleared to shape itself into people or buildings. But overall, there was just too much of that kind of footage that was like a psychedelic trip. The footage you could actually see was interesting, but minute after minute with just occasional blurred figures emerging briefly from the fog got annoying. And this time I was the one who hated the music. I can see why the director went with scratchy, discordant strings, because it fitted both the subject matter and the scratchy look of the film. That would have been very effective for ten minutes - after 25 minutes, I just wanted that awful noise to stop (and thankfully, it did change for the last 15 minutes of the film). I would have liked this a lot more if it had been shorter, frankly, like Back to the Soil. 6/10
Frame by Frame. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, taking a photograph was a crime. After the Taliban fell, a new generation of photojournalists began to emerge to document a changing Afghanistan for the rest of the world. This doumentary tells the story of four such photojournalists, including one who runs Afghanistan's only school of photography.
This is a documentary about some very brave people. Even though photography is no longer a crime, documenting events in Afghanistan is not a safe occupation. In trying to tell the stories of four people, and the stories they themselves are trying to tell, the main drawback is that the film feels a bit crowded. Each one of the subjects could have held a film entirely by themselves, but they would have been different films, and I'm not sure which would have been better. The balance in this film was certainly a plus. All four of the photojournalists attended the screening, and the woman said initially she was very reluctant to take part - she has made it her mission in life to record what happens to women in Afghanistan, but has tried very much to stay out of the spotlight herself, for her own safety. But then she realised that if she said no, the film-makers would create yet another film about Afghanistan that was only about men, and she couldn't let that be the story. 8/10
The Coffin in the Mountain. A body is found just outside a small mountain village in China, burned beyond recognition. But it turns out there was more than one body in the woods that day, and as assumption after assumption about the identity of the body in the coffin turns out to be mistaken, the secret lives of the villagers are gradually revealed.
This film was a great surprise to me, and in a good way. With no reviews on imdb to go off, I thought I was going to see a drama, but it turned out to be a very entertaining farce. It starts slowly, with a fairly straight story told over the first 20 minutes or so, but then we see the same 24 hour period retold over and over from the perspectives of different people and the increasingly complex muddled mess gets funnier and funnier as more pieces are added to the overall picture. Points for best use of a mobile phone as a plot device I have yet seen :-) 8/10
Corn Island. The Inguri river forms a tense border between Georgia and Abkhazia - tense because Georgia considers Abkhazia part of its territory, while Abkhazia considers itself an independent nation. In this river, islands are revealed as the floodwaters recede each spring, and local people move into this no man's land to plant corn in the growing season. Corn Island tells the story of an old man and his granddaughter growing their harvest in the face of border patrols and a fugitive hiding from both sides of authority.
The film has beautiful cinematography. It has barely any plot. The old man is very taciturn, so there's hardly any dialogue. I kept thinking it would liven up when the fugitive appears, but he speaks a different language, so there's still no dialogue and it really doesn't. I expected this film to be somewhat slow from the reviews at imdb, but it scores highly there, and I didn't expect it to move at geological pace. It gets 5/10 for being pretty, and if you want something pretty to look at while you fall asleep, this is probably ideal.
And that gets me up to date! I'm going to be missing out on a lot of SIFF this year, because I'm going out of town next week, so I'll have just one more film post before I go. It's sad because there are some films I'd really love to see that aren't showing until later in the festival, so I'll just have to hope there's a chance to track them down eventually.
teaforme, who came to stay with us, which meant we went to see a lot of films in a short time, and none of them got written up. Normally I do a post after every three films or so, but not this time...The Farewell Party. Several residents in an Israeli retirement home get together and build a euthanasia machine for a very ill friend who wants to die. All goes well until rumours about the death start to spread through the home, and other people also want to use the machine. The group come under serious emotional and ethical strain, as their endeavour goes from helping one friend to being Dr Kevorkian, and each person has a different idea on where and how to draw the line.
There are some wonderful moments of comedy in this film, which is well acted with some truly charming central characters. The voluntary euthanasia debate is central to the film, and covered from all angles. It's not flawless - one character seemed just too unpleasant to be credible to me, not because there aren't people like that, but because none of the others seemed to be aware of just how selfish he was. There was also an odd moment with a musical number that didn't work for me. But overall, this was a very entertaining look at a very serious subject. 8/10
Snow on the Blades. As Japan begins to open up to the west at the end of the Edo period, there is internal unrest between those in favour and those who oppose it. Shimura Kingo is the personal bodyguard to a lord who is assassinated on his watch. Forbidden the traditional ritual suicide, he is instead assigned the task of finding and killing the assassins. Thirteen years later, he is still trying to find the last surviving assailant, but during those years, the world has changed around him, and the samurai and their code are now a laughing stock, an archaic remnant of a backward-looking world.
The film is a commentary on the pace of change in the world, and the struggle to maintain a personal sense of honour and what that means to different people. It has beautiful cinematography, but can be a little heavy-handed in places - too much is said instead of implied, and sometimes visual messages are very in-your-face. I did like the role of the women in this film - the period massively limits what they can say and do, but their actions are a huge influence on the men, just the same. I was never in any doubt how the film was going to end, but I was very curious to know what Shimura's self-justification was going to be, and I did not guess the source of honour that he chose. Pretty to look at, and entertaining despite me wishing for a little more subtlety. 7/10
The New Girlfriend. Laura and Claire have been friends since childhood. When Laura is dying, Claire promises to look out for her husband and baby daughter. Claire then discovers that David is a transvestite, and since Laura's death he has been spending more time as a woman, dressed in his dead wife's clothes. In keeping her promise to Laura, Claire grows closer to Virginia than she ever was to David.
This film starts so well - it's utterly charming and full of humour, and I was enjoying it immensely and thinking it would be worth 8/10. And then it suddenly decides it needs to have an ending, and descends into terrible cliched melodrama, before wrapping everything up abruptly without giving even a nod to the difficult emotional consequences of its characters' choices. It's like a cheery day out that turns into a car crash and leaves you wondering what the hell just happened. 5/10
Beyond Zero: 1914-1918. This was a showing of two short films by the same director. The first was a standard length short, called Back to the Soil. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, as Communism strengthened its grip, Jews were banned from the merchant trades and rendered penniless. A Jewish committee arranged for these newly jobless people to be resettled into the Ukraine and Belarus and given land as farmers. The director's grandfather went on a tour of these newly settled communities, filming what he saw, and the director has re-edited this old footage into this short film. The footage was very repetitive - town after town of bedraggled-looking people working the land by hand and with horses - but instead of boring I found it utterly haunting. The entire subject was something I'd never even heard of, and the constant images of windswept steppes with everyone dressed against the cold even in late May really brought home what a miserable existence it must have been for these city folk who were suddenly told to farm or starve. I scored it 8/10, but the SO and
teaforme both hated the music and scored it lower.The titular Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 was in the same vein, but using old nitrate footage of the Great War. Some of this footage was in very poor condition, and it was shown with all its imperfections. This could be used to great effect - footage of soldiers training for trench warfare disappearing into what looked like blurry flame was very apt, considering what happened to so many of them. At other times, it was an interesting visual puzzle as a blotchy mess gradually cleared to shape itself into people or buildings. But overall, there was just too much of that kind of footage that was like a psychedelic trip. The footage you could actually see was interesting, but minute after minute with just occasional blurred figures emerging briefly from the fog got annoying. And this time I was the one who hated the music. I can see why the director went with scratchy, discordant strings, because it fitted both the subject matter and the scratchy look of the film. That would have been very effective for ten minutes - after 25 minutes, I just wanted that awful noise to stop (and thankfully, it did change for the last 15 minutes of the film). I would have liked this a lot more if it had been shorter, frankly, like Back to the Soil. 6/10
Frame by Frame. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, taking a photograph was a crime. After the Taliban fell, a new generation of photojournalists began to emerge to document a changing Afghanistan for the rest of the world. This doumentary tells the story of four such photojournalists, including one who runs Afghanistan's only school of photography.
This is a documentary about some very brave people. Even though photography is no longer a crime, documenting events in Afghanistan is not a safe occupation. In trying to tell the stories of four people, and the stories they themselves are trying to tell, the main drawback is that the film feels a bit crowded. Each one of the subjects could have held a film entirely by themselves, but they would have been different films, and I'm not sure which would have been better. The balance in this film was certainly a plus. All four of the photojournalists attended the screening, and the woman said initially she was very reluctant to take part - she has made it her mission in life to record what happens to women in Afghanistan, but has tried very much to stay out of the spotlight herself, for her own safety. But then she realised that if she said no, the film-makers would create yet another film about Afghanistan that was only about men, and she couldn't let that be the story. 8/10
The Coffin in the Mountain. A body is found just outside a small mountain village in China, burned beyond recognition. But it turns out there was more than one body in the woods that day, and as assumption after assumption about the identity of the body in the coffin turns out to be mistaken, the secret lives of the villagers are gradually revealed.
This film was a great surprise to me, and in a good way. With no reviews on imdb to go off, I thought I was going to see a drama, but it turned out to be a very entertaining farce. It starts slowly, with a fairly straight story told over the first 20 minutes or so, but then we see the same 24 hour period retold over and over from the perspectives of different people and the increasingly complex muddled mess gets funnier and funnier as more pieces are added to the overall picture. Points for best use of a mobile phone as a plot device I have yet seen :-) 8/10
Corn Island. The Inguri river forms a tense border between Georgia and Abkhazia - tense because Georgia considers Abkhazia part of its territory, while Abkhazia considers itself an independent nation. In this river, islands are revealed as the floodwaters recede each spring, and local people move into this no man's land to plant corn in the growing season. Corn Island tells the story of an old man and his granddaughter growing their harvest in the face of border patrols and a fugitive hiding from both sides of authority.
The film has beautiful cinematography. It has barely any plot. The old man is very taciturn, so there's hardly any dialogue. I kept thinking it would liven up when the fugitive appears, but he speaks a different language, so there's still no dialogue and it really doesn't. I expected this film to be somewhat slow from the reviews at imdb, but it scores highly there, and I didn't expect it to move at geological pace. It gets 5/10 for being pretty, and if you want something pretty to look at while you fall asleep, this is probably ideal.
And that gets me up to date! I'm going to be missing out on a lot of SIFF this year, because I'm going out of town next week, so I'll have just one more film post before I go. It's sad because there are some films I'd really love to see that aren't showing until later in the festival, so I'll just have to hope there's a chance to track them down eventually.
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I think part of the problem was that I've seen a lot of samurai films, so I know all about the code of honour and don't need it spelled out. The director was at the screening, and he explained that there's a new generation of Japanese teenagers who really don't know the samurai history at all, so he was trying to cater to an audience who are entirely new to the backstory.
Corn Island was the only one I felt I could have walked out of. I found myself dozing instead, and resurfacing to find I'd missed nothing. The New Girlfriend only fell apart in the last 25 minutes or so, thankfully.
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I just wish I could have done the entire festival!
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You're welcome to stay with us again whenever you visit. If you come when it's not SIFF, we might even manage to cook for you!